Abstract: This paper investigates the effect of International
Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption on the frequency of
earnings managements towards small positive profits. We focus on
two emerging markets IFRS adopters: South Africa and Turkey.
We tested our logistic regression using appropriate panelestimation
techniques over a sample of 330 South African and 210
Turkish firm-year observations over the period 2002-2008. Our
results document that mandatory adoption of IFRS is not associated
with a reduction in earnings management towards small positive
profits in emerging markets. These results contradict most of the
previous findings of the studies conducted in developed countries.
Based on the legal system factor, we compare the intensity of
earnings management between a code law country (Turkey) and a
common law country (South Africa) over the pre and post-adoption
periods. Our findings show that the frequency of such earnings
management practice increases significantly for the code law
country.
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to study Database Models
to use them efficiently in E-commerce websites. In this paper we are
going to find a method which can save and retrieve information in Ecommerce
websites. Thus, semantic web applications can work with,
and we are also going to study different technologies of E-commerce
databases and we know that one of the most important deficits in
semantic web is the shortage of semantic data, since most of the
information is still stored in relational databases, we present an
approach to map legacy data stored in relational databases into the
Semantic Web using virtually any modern RDF query language, as
long as it is closed within RDF. To achieve this goal we study XML
structures for relational data bases of old websites and eventually we
will come up one level over XML and look for a map from relational
model (RDM) to RDF. Noting that a large number of semantic webs
get advantage of relational model, opening the ways which can be
converted to XML and RDF in modern systems (semantic web) is
important.
Abstract: A large amount of valuable information is available in
plain text clinical reports. New techniques and technologies are
applied to extract information from these reports. In this study, we
developed a domain based software system to transform 600
Otorhinolaryngology discharge notes to a structured form for
extracting clinical data from the discharge notes. In order to decrease
the system process time discharge notes were transformed into a data
table after preprocessing. Several word lists were constituted to
identify common section in the discharge notes, including patient
history, age, problems, and diagnosis etc. N-gram method was used
for discovering terms co-Occurrences within each section. Using this
method a dataset of concept candidates has been generated for the
validation step, and then Predictive Apriori algorithm for Association
Rule Mining (ARM) was applied to validate candidate concepts.
Abstract: Sweet cherries (Prunus avium L.) contain various
phenolic compounds which contribute to total antioxidant activity.
Total polyphenols, tannins, flavonoids and anthocyanins, and
antioxidant capacity in a fruits of a number of selected sweet cherry
genotypes were investigated. Total polyphenols content ranged from
4.12 to 8.34 mg gallic acid equivantents/g dry fruit weight and total
tannins content ranged from 0.19 to 1.95 mg gallic acid equivalent/g
dry fruit weight. Total flavonoids were within the range 0.42-1.56 mg
of rutin equivalents/g dry fruit weight and total anthocyanins content
were between 0.35 and 0.69 mg cyanidin 3-glucoside equivalent/ g
dry fruit weight. Although sweet cherry fruits are a significant source
of different phenolic compounds, antioxidant activity of sweet
cherries is not related only with the total polyphenolics, flavonoids or
anthocyanins.
Abstract: Microarray data profiles gene expression on a whole
genome scale, therefore, it provides a good way to study associations
between gene expression and occurrence or progression of cancer.
More and more researchers realized that microarray data is helpful
to predict cancer sample. However, the high dimension of gene
expressions is much larger than the sample size, which makes this
task very difficult. Therefore, how to identify the significant genes
causing cancer becomes emergency and also a hot and hard research
topic. Many feature selection algorithms have been proposed in
the past focusing on improving cancer predictive accuracy at the
expense of ignoring the correlations between the features. In this
work, a novel framework (named by SGS) is presented for stable gene
selection and efficient cancer prediction . The proposed framework
first performs clustering algorithm to find the gene groups where
genes in each group have higher correlation coefficient, and then
selects the significant genes in each group with Bayesian Lasso and
important gene groups with group Lasso, and finally builds prediction
model based on the shrinkage gene space with efficient classification
algorithm (such as, SVM, 1NN, Regression and etc.). Experiment
results on real world data show that the proposed framework often
outperforms the existing feature selection and prediction methods,
say SAM, IG and Lasso-type prediction model.
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to know the sociodemographic
and operational-financial determinants of the services
quality perceived by users of the national health services. Through
the use of an inquiry conducted by the Ministry of Health,
comprehending 16.936 interviews in 2006, we intend to find out if
there is any characteristic that determines the 2006 inquiry results.
With the revision of the literature we also want to know if the
operational-financial results have implications in hospitals users-
perception on the quality of the received services. In order to achieve
our main goals we will make use of the regression analysis to find out
the possible dimensions that determine those results.
Abstract: In this paper, we address the problem of reducing the
switching activity (SA) in on-chip buses through the use of a bus
binding technique in high-level synthesis. While many binding
techniques to reduce the SA exist, we present yet another technique for
further reducing the switching activity. Our proposed method
combines bus binding and data sequence reordering to explore a wider
solution space. The problem is formulated as a multiple traveling
salesman problem and solved using simulated annealing technique.
The experimental results revealed that a binding solution obtained
with the proposed method reduces 5.6-27.2% (18.0% on average) and
2.6-12.7% (6.8% on average) of the switching activity when compared
with conventional binding-only and hybrid binding-encoding
methods, respectively.
Abstract: Fruits and vegetables are the essentials of a healthy
diet, mainly because of their antioxidant properties contributing to
disease blockage especially for some certain types of cancer. Being a
favourite fruit, citrus are produced for economic and commercial
purposes worldwide. Particularly, lemon fruit (Citrus limon L.), has
an important place in export products of Turkey. Lemon has a great
importance on human nutrition with regard to being a source of
nutrients, flavonoids, vitamin C and minerals. It is used for food
flavouring and pickling and also processed for lemonade. By
processing citrus into fruit juices, consumption may increase and also
become easier. Like many fruits and vegetables lemons are cheap and
abundant during harvesting period, while they are quite expensive in
other seasons. Lemon juice and concentrate production allows
consumers to get benefits from lemon fruit in any time of the year.
Lemonade is getting in to the focus of consumers’ attention
preferring non-carbonated drinks. The demand of healthy, convenient
functional foods affects consumer trends through innovative
products. For this reason, lemonade could be enriched with different
natural herb extracts such as ginger (Zingiber officinale), linden (Tilia
cordata), and mint (Mentha piperita).
Abstract: To determine the length of engagement threads of a bolt installed in a tapped part in order to avoid the threads stripping remains a very current problem in the design of the thread assemblies. It does not exist a calculation method formalized for the cases where the bolt is screwed directly in a ductile material. In this article, we study the behavior of the threads stripping of a loaded assembly by using a modelling by finite elements and a rupture criterion by damage. This modelling enables us to study the different parameters likely to influence the behavior of this bolted connection. We study in particular, the influence of couple of materials constituting the connection, of the bolt-s diameter and the geometrical characteristics of the tapped part, like the external diameter and the length of engagement threads. We established an experiments design to know the most significant parameters. That enables us to propose a simple expression making possible to calculate the resistance of the threads whatever the metallic materials of the bolt and the tapped part. We carried out stripping tests in order to validate our model. The estimated results are very close to those obtained by the tests.
Abstract: Names are important in many societies, even in technologically oriented ones which use e.g. ID systems to identify individual people. Names such as surnames are the most important as they are used in many processes, such as identifying of people and genealogical research. On the other hand variation of names can be a major problem for the identification and search for people, e.g. web search or security reasons. Name matching presumes a-priori that the recorded name written in one alphabet reflects the phonetic identity of two samples or some transcription error in copying a previously recorded name. We add to this the lode that the two names imply the same person. This paper describes name variations and some basic description of various name matching algorithms developed to overcome name variation and to find reasonable variants of names which can be used to further increasing mismatches for record linkage and name search. The implementation contains algorithms for computing a range of fuzzy matching based on different types of algorithms, e.g. composite and hybrid methods and allowing us to test and measure algorithms for accuracy. NYSIIS, LIG2 and Phonex have been shown to perform well and provided sufficient flexibility to be included in the linkage/matching process for optimising name searching.
Abstract: This paper presents a hybrid association control
scheme that can maintain load balancing among access points in the
wireless LANs and can satisfy the quality of service requirements of
the multimedia traffic applications. The proposed model is
mathematically described as a linear programming model. Simulation
study and analysis were conducted in order to demonstrate the
performance of the proposed hybrid load balancing and association
control scheme. Simulation results shows that the proposed scheme
outperforms the other schemes in term of the percentage of blocking
and the quality of the data transfer rate providing to the multimedia
and real-time applications.
Abstract: The reliable results of an insulated oval duct
considering heat radiation are obtained basing on accurate oval
perimeter obtained by integral method as well as one-dimensional
Plane Wedge Thermal Resistance (PWTR) model. This is an extension
study of former paper of insulated oval duct neglecting heat radiation.
It is found that in the practical situations with long-short-axes ratio a/b
4.5% while t/R2
Abstract: The curriculum of the primary school science course was redesigned on the basis of constructivism in 2005-2006 academic years, in Turkey. In this context, the name of this course has been changed as “Science and Technology"; and both content and course books, students workbooks for this course have been redesigned in light of constructivism. The aim of this study is to determine whether the Science and Technology course books and student work books for primary school 5th grade are appropriate for the constructivism by evaluating them in terms of the fundamental principles of constructivism. In this study, out of qualitative research methods, documentation technique (i.e. document analysis) is applied; while selecting samples, criterion-sampling is used out of purposeful sampling techniques. When the Science and Technology course book and workbook for the 5th grade in primary education are examined, it is seen that both books complete each other in certain areas. Consequently, it can be claimed that in spite of some inadequate and missing points in the course book and workbook of the primary school Science and Technology course for the 5th grade students, these books are attempted to be designed in terms of the principles of constructivism. To overcome the inadequacies in the books, it can be suggested to redesign them. In addition to them, not to ignore the technology dimension of the course, the activities that encourage the students to prepare projects using technology cycle should be included.
Abstract: Web-based cooperative learning focuses on (1) the interaction and the collaboration of community members, and (2) the sharing and the distribution of knowledge and expertise by network technology to enhance learning performance. Numerous research literatures related to web-based cooperative learning have demonstrated that cooperative scripts have a positive impact to specify, sequence, and assign cooperative learning activities. Besides, literatures have indicated that role-play in web-based cooperative learning environments enhances two or more students to work together toward the completion of a common goal. Since students generally do not know each other and they lack the face-to-face contact that is necessary for the negotiation of assigning group roles in web-based cooperative learning environments, this paper intends to further extend the application of genetic algorithm (GA) and propose a GA-based algorithm to tackle the problem of role assignment in web-based cooperative learning environments, which not only saves communication costs but also reduces conflict between group members in negotiating role assignments.
Abstract: An attempt in this paper proposes a re-modification to
the minimum moment approach of resource leveling which is a modified minimum moment approach to the traditional method by
Harris. The method is based on critical path method. The new approach suggests the difference between the methods in the
selection criteria of activity which needs to be shifted for leveling resource histogram. In traditional method, the improvement factor
found first to select the activity for each possible day of shifting. In
modified method maximum value of the product of Resources Rate
and Free Float was found first and improvement factor is then
calculated for that activity which needs to be shifted. In the proposed
method the activity to be selected first for shifting is based on the largest value of resource rate. The process is repeated for all the
remaining activities for possible shifting to get updated histogram.
The proposed method significantly reduces the number of iterations
and is easier for manual computations.
Abstract: In this paper a new concept of partial complement of a graph G is introduced and using the same a new graph parameter, called completion number of a graph G, denoted by c(G) is defined. Some basic properties of graph parameter, completion number, are studied and upperbounds for completion number of classes of graphs are obtained , the paper includes the characterization also.
Abstract: Nuclear matrix protein 22 (NMP22) is a FDA approved
biomarker for bladder cancer. The objective of this study is to develop
a simple NMP22 immumosensor (NMP22-IMS) for accurate
measurement of NMP22. The NMP22-IMS was constructed with
NMP22 antibody immobilized on screen-printed carbon electrodes.
The construction procedures and antibody immobilization are simple.
Results showed that the NMP22-IMS has an excellent (r2³0.95)
response range (20 – 100 ng/mL). In conclusion, a simple and reliable
NMP22-IMS was developed, capable of precisely determining urine
NMP22 level.
Abstract: Financial forecasting is an example of signal processing problems. A number of ways to train/learn the network are available. We have used Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm for error back-propagation for weight adjustment. Pre-processing of data has reduced much of the variation at large scale to small scale, reducing the variation of training data.
Abstract: Ireland developed a National Strategy 2030 that
argued for the creation of a new form of higher education institution,
a Technological University. The research reported here reviews the
first stage of this partnership development. The study found that
national policy can create system capacity and change, but that
individual partners may have more to gain or lose in collaborating.
When presented as a zero-sum activity, fear among partners is high.
The level of knowledge and networking within the higher education
system possessed by each partner contributed to decisions to
participate or not in a joint proposal for collaboration. Greater
success resulted when there were gains for all partners. This research
concludes that policy mandates can provide motivation to
collaborate, but that the partnership needs to be built more on shared
values versus coercion by mandates.
Abstract: In the stadium structure, the significant dynamic
responses such as resonance or similar behavior can be occurred by
spectator rhythmical activities. Thus, accurate analysis and precise
investigation of stadium structure that is subjected to dynamic loads
are required for practical design and serviceability check of stadium
structures. Moreover, it is desirable to measure and analyze the
dynamic loads of spectator activities because these dynamic loads can
not be easily expressed in numerical formula. In this study, various
dynamic loads induced by spectator movements are measured and
analyzed. These dynamic loads induced by spectators movement of
stadium structure can be classified into the impact load and the
periodic load. These dynamic loads can be expressed as Fourier
harmonic load. And, these dynamic loads could be applied for the
accurate vibration analysis of a stadium structure.